Tango down! Chat app millions ransacked by pro-Assad hacktivists

Hacktivists loyal to Syria's president Bashar al-Assad claim to have extracted 1.5TB of sensitive data from chat app Tango.

The Syrian Electronic Army, best known for hacking into the official Twitter feeds of the Associated Press and The Guardian, boasted it swiped the mobile numbers and contact details of millions of users of the popular messaging and gaming platform:

The Syrian Electronic Army [SEA] hacked the Tango app (video/text messages service) website and database. The databases content a of millions of the app users phone numbers and contacts and their emails More than 1,5 TB of the daily-backups of the servers network has been downloaded successfully.

SEA posted screenshots (here and here) to back up its claims. "Much of the information in the databases that were downloaded will be delivered to the Syrian government," it said.

eHackingnews, which broke the story, reported that Tango was hit thanks to a vulnerable WordPress installation, based on screenshots of the hack supplied by the SEA.

Tango confirmed it had suffered an intrusion via updates to its official Twitter feed on Saturday.

"Tango experienced a cyber intrusion that resulted in unauthorized access to some data. We are working on increasing our security systems," it said, adding "We sincerely apologize for any inconvenience this breach may have caused our members."

Tango's blog is unreachable and its main website resolves to its official Facebook page at the time of writing on Monday. ®